failure

Today is one of those days when I want to just throw in the towel, and go find a job that pays. Or, better, go find a job that doesn't feel like I am taking sandpaper and a cheese grater to my soul on a regular basis.

Recently, I was catching up via the internet with a friend who currently stays in England. We hadn't chatted in quite some time, and I was bringing her up to speed on the shape of my research (such as it is). "Is it hard?" she asked.

Hmm...

This is a deceptive question. The honest answer is that if it's hard for me, it's only hard for me because it's so easy for me. I have the luxury of it being hard for me; I'm never really inside that 'hard'. Yes, some of this is the manifestation of the need to beat myself with the fieldwork stick because I don't work in a village, I don't have that quintessential 'village' experience that all good anthropologists are supposed to have (in some sort of slippage of anthropological and Peace Corps rites de passage). I have, up until this point, done all my work in and around the main hospital in the capital city (albeit the capital of a country whose population is less than that of some major American cities). But part of it is also this sense of buffer, of floating around experiences of difficulty and harship and suffering rather than being inside them. It's hard for me because it's not really hard for me, and that makes me feel like shit.

The feeling of failure as an ethnographer is something I think probably most anthropology students in the field grapple with at some point, but it's not exactly one of those things over which you can bond, even in an alcohol-soaked state.